All I ever wanted...

Can anyone sing the tune to those words? If I said "All Girl group from the 80s," would that remind you of the song? Yep, I'm referring to the song "Vacation" by the Go-Gos.

On that note (pun intended), I am preparing for our annual family vacation, and this year is a little different. We are going, not to a National Park, but to Disneyworld. A different kind of National Park, if you will. This will be Derick's and my third time going together, but our boys' first time. And even more fun, we are going with my mother and my sister-in-law, Aunt Melinda.

Of course, being a true scrapper, I can't get ready for vacation without thinking about scrapbooking the vacation. Here's where I stand: I do some preparation for photos, and some thinking about the scrapbooking of the vacation, but I also want to leave my planning a little loose. I don't want to plan photos, in other words. This is also how we vacation, BTW: we plan what we'd like to do and make a general daily plan, but there's a lot of open space for spontaneity.I have some things in mind, though. Here's my plan:

1. I will not use themed products. Granted, I have used travel paper lines from Making Memories and Little Yellow Bicycle from the past few years, but most travel lines are tropical or National Park-y for Disney. Aside from travel and Christmas lines, I prefer to avoid themed products. Instead, I can picture and album on white or black paper using bright colors--maybe from my scrap pile!
2. I will take a variety of photos. This sounds like a no-brainer, but my first few vacations, I took too many landscape photos without photos of the people--and the people were always the same distance away. I think the album will better represent our memories (and be more interesting) if I take photos of people, landscapes, closeups, medium shots, and far away shots. In other words, I'll take photos that tell a story.
3. I'll take some photos of my boys from behind. This might sound dumb, but the last page of the albums for me have always included photos of my family from behind--the readers will sort of be looking back on the vacation when they see these photos. (If anyone takes a photo of me from behind, I will hunt them down and force feed them to drink pickle juice.)
4. I will once again try to take a nice family photo for our Christmas card. Once again I will likely fail and have to make a layout like this again:
5. I will bring a small notebook to journal memories in at the end of each day. This will become my journaling and will help me remember stories when I finally get around to scrapping the vacation album.
   
6. I will probably take thousands of photos. I will also try not to feel guilty about that.
7. At the end of vacation, I will ask everyone what their five favorite vacation memories are. This will be a mini-album I'll scrap as soon as I get back. I'll pair a nice picture of each person from vacation with their 5 favorites:
8. I will attempt to delete bad photos right away, and I will attempt to edit and print photos within a couple months of our return. That one's a goal. It makes me more excited to scrap when I have fresh pictures, and it feels like a burden for me when I delay photo-processing too long.

When I finally do the album, I plan on making it 8 1/2 x 11, post-bound, mainly because that's what I've always done. I like the limited space. I also use the same design every time. Here's a same from last year:

It's a nice design, I can fit lots of photos, and it will be quicker if I don't have to think about how to set up the pages.